F recently lent me her copy of The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky, and I read it yesterday afternoon and this morning.

It’s not the sort of thing I usually read; I read novels, mostly, occasionally travel writing or history, sometimes feminist texts. F had mentioned the book to me before she sent it, and I was expecting an academic book; the fact that it appeared to be more of a self-help book put me off it a bit. I prefer to learn about myself by analogy, by taking insights about characters in novels and looking at how they could apply to my very different situation. The directness of self-help books seems too one-size-fits-all, too Pollyannaish; and if I’m honest, I don’t value solutions that are given to me, only the ones I find for myself.

However, I did find the Lyubomirsky interesting. It made me think about just how many of my troubles are rooted in my own negativity, and in particular it reminded me of a couple of things I’ve done in the past which have helped with low moods - trying to take at least one photo with my phone camera every day, which helps to draw me out of myself and make me see the interesting, beautiful and quirky things around me, and posting lists of “reasons to be cheerful” on my personal blog, which helps me to focus on the good things in my life. I want to start doing both of those again - the photos every day, the reasons to be cheerful every week, probably.

I was also interested in the section on “focusing on goals” as a way to increase happiness, because I would have said that was what I was trying to do. The book made a useful distinction between “intrinsic” and “extrinisic” goals, which made me think (once again) how maybe success at work will never make me happy, and which also made me think that actually, “focusing” on anything switches it from being something I do because I want to to something I feel I have to do. So perhaps I shouldn’t be trying to set goals.

It made an interesting read, even if I didn’t agree with parts of it (in particular, her insistence that anyone suffering from depression should seek medical help, which seemed to go against all the self-help principles of the rest of the book; I don’t want to take drugs that alter my brain chemistry and couldn’t afford therapy even if I didn’t dislike the idea of letting someone else try to fit the jigsaw of my brain together so much). It’s reminded me of a few things I could be doing but have got out of the habit of, and I’ll try to get back into those habits, but it didn’t suggest anything really new.

But then, I always knew that I had all the answers I needed. The problem is that I’m still trying to work out what the questions are.

SJ has been writing about disliking herself.

I can really understand where she is coming from. I’m finishing up steps 4 and 5 (yay!) and moving onto step 6, and that’s all about getting in touch with my shortcomings. Through steps 4 and 5, I’ve learned a lot about my defects of character and, more scarily, how very much they have dominated my life.

Currently my list stands at over 200 - and I’m not done - so I’ll spare you the details. But the same themes keep coming up, over and over, And I am coming to understand how my dark side has created my history, the same story again and again. It is sobering stuff.

My dark side is selfishness and self-obsession. It’s compulsive approval-seeking. It’s corrosive negativity and harsh, critical judgment about myself and others. It’s fear. It’s competitiveness, underpinned by bone-deep terror that there isn’t enough, that if I don’t win then I won’t survive. It’s ego and narcissism. It’s obsessive control. And it is fantasy and denial, which deserves a whole post to itself and will no doubt get one sooner or later.

I do try not to behave like this, really quite hard. (I sat by the water with my tutor and we talked about our dark sides, and she said ‘you come across as the complete opposite’, which was something of a relief.) But I think people who are closer to me would recognise everything on that list and, even more, so would those I have loved.

And even when my dark side is not controlling my behaviour, it is controlling my thoughts. I might be acting sweet, caring and concerned, but the voice in my head is saying ‘how am I going to get what I want?’, or ‘how am I doing? am I winning?’ or ‘what do they think of me? what can I do to please them further?’

It’s there all the time. In meetings, I will again and again find myself caught up in a vicious mental criticism of the speaker, perhaps 20 or 30 times in an hour. In college, rather than getting into true exploration with my fascinating lecturers, I’m choosing my words carefully, led by that inner voice. Are they impressed with me? Will they remember me? Might they want to work with me one day?. I feel like I’m faking my relationships, and, in a way, I am. And in another way I’m not, because this is me. It is my dark side, but my dark side is part of me as well, and I have to accept that.

I can’t remember whether I’ve written about conscious incompetence? It’s part of a model of learning, and it perfectly describes how I feel as I get in touch with these defects of character. I notice the voice in my head - but I notice it fifteen seconds too late.

It is tiring. And it is dispiriting - will I always be at the mercy of my defects of character? And it makes it very easy to dislike myself.

But, until this year, I wasn’t aware of any of this. Until this year, I was mired in unconscious incompetence, and that’s worse. I didn’t know I was controlled by my defects of character - I just knew that I was never happy and nothing ever worked out the way I wanted. And I blamed everyone and everything but myself.

This way is better. It offers hope that I can change - indeed, that I am already changing. Conscious incompetence leads to conscious competence and conscious competence leads, over time, to unconscious competence.

I’ll finish with a quote from the psychologist James Hillman. (Thanks to Loehr and Schwartz for the reference).

Loving oneself is no easy matter… because it means loving all of oneself, including the shadow where one is inferior and socially so unacceptable. The care one gives this humiliating part is the cure… [but] the moral dimension can never be abandoned. Thus is the cure a paradox requiring two incommensurables: the moral recognition that these parts are burdensome and intolerable and must change, and the loving, laughing acceptance which takes them just as they are, joyfully, forever. One both tries hard and lets go, judges harshly and joins gladly…”

This feels like a good space to aim for. SJ, I hope this helps.

I am writing this in class.

I often write posts in class, because for some reason I find class a very creative space. And today, I am writing in class because the topic is not for me and I am too tired to do any serious work. So it’s this or the crossword. (In fact, it’s this and the crossword. But nothing else.)

It’s got me thinking about energy.

My energy levels are low at the moment. I am not terribly well, and one of the consequences of this is that I can’t do my normal exercise. This is a bit of a vicious circle, because not exercising makes me tired and being tired makes me slow to recover enough to exercise.

Also, I’m not enjoying myself. I’m spending the bulk of my time doing either college work or step work, which are both solitary and challenging. And this creates another vicious circle - I do difficult stuff, so I’m tired, so I don’t make the effort to go out and do things I like, so I don’t recharge my energy.

It worries me a little. If I feel this tired when I’m not working, how can I contemplate working again? And it doesn’t feel great. I am not enjoying my life right now, and I would like to enjoy it more, and I would like to enjoy it more by changing my approach, rather than just waiting for this phase of my life to be over.

So I ask myself the question: how am I contributing to this? What is my part? What could I do differently?

And of course I know the answer.

I’m not taking physical care of myself. I’m not eating well - I’m mostly surviving on bread and taramasalata. I’m not able to do yoga or swimming right now, but I could do Pilates, and I’m avoiding it because it bores me. I’m going to bed too late, and since I always wake when the sun rises, I’m perpetually short of sleep. Loehr and Schwartz, who specialise in energy, hold physical energy as the foundation stone of their model.

What else? I’m spending far too much time alone. I’ve foisted myself on a couple of friends and their cats for dinner tonight, and I’m ridiculously excited. I’ve spent the last couple of evenings chatting with my flatmate’s other half, which has been very energising (although this is a mixed blessing at 10.30pm). And, of course, she remains an oasis in my life. But other than that, nothing since I returned to work after Croatia. And that was so glorious that it’s perhaps unsurprising that life now seems a trifle flat.

It’s not completely straightforward, because it takes 60-90 minutes to get to most of my friends. (Yet another good reason to move to Scotland.) I need to find a balance between loneliness-exhaustion and overdoing-it-exhaustion. But I have been isolating myself, and this is not good.

What else? I’m putting myself under a lot of pressure. Have to do well at course, my future depends on it. Have to make progress in recovery, frightened of losing momentum and desperate for the changes it promises. I could really use a holiday - anyone want a week in Croatia? - but when? I’ve got three major assignments to complete during the next six weeks.

There’s a reality about my life right now, as well. This is a time of transition for me. It’s a challenging time. It is a lonely time. It’s okay that sometimes I have low energy and low morale. I’m fine, but I don’t want to pretend that things are really great, because they aren’t.

But I could do better than I’m doing, and I need more energy than I have. And it’s really important to me to take responsibility for myself, rather than writing it down to circumstances. This year is hard, but it’s not likely to be the hardest I ever face. I need to be able to take care of myself when things get tough.

I could do something about everything I’ve listed here. I’ve been shirking it so far, but I could, and if I’m serious about taking responsibility then I will have to. I’m not quite sure where to start with any of these - thoughts are welcomed. I do know to start small rather than try to do everything at once.

I’m rather hoping that writing this post will give me the necessary kick in the butt. We shall discover.

In our introduction to this blog, one of the things F and I wrote was We believe that everyone’s different and we’re different for good reasons; F’s recent post on positive deviance addresses exactly this.

The further I go on this journey, the more I wonder if that’s really true. We have both posted our thoughts about whether our problems at work were down to us, or to the organisations we have worked in. I would really like to believe that it’s a bit of both, but increasingly I’m not sure it is.

I feel that I’ve learnt a lot about myself over the last few months. And I don’t really like what I’ve learnt. Right now, I wish I’d just carried on trying to fit in, instead of isolating myself further by arrogantly assuming that I was right and the rest of the world was wrong.

I hope that something positive will come out of this process of self-discovery in the end, but it’s hard to see it right now. I’m close to being overwhelmed by dislike for myself, and I have no idea how to dismantle everything I hate and build something that actually works.

Do you want to know the one thing I want out of life? It’s very simple. I want to feel like a worthwhile and useful member of the human race.

And I don’t think counting beans for an elite university really does that.

But at least now I have a question to ask, which is a good place to start looking for answers.

Two of the people I admire most in the workplace are my two most recent exes, both of whom I worked with before I dated them.

I admire the first because of his professional judgment, which is impeccable. He would come home and say ‘those two teams are going to merge’, or ‘A is going to leave and B will get his job’. No inside knowledge – just instinct. And he was always right, every single time. If I’d opened a book on his words of wisdom, I’d have made a fortune.

This is an amazing gift (and a damn useful one), but all I can do is to admire it from afar. There is no point in trying to develop my ability in this space.

I admire the second for something rather different – his ability to detach. He works hard, but at the end of the day he leaves work in the office where it belongs. And, if things are not going the way he thinks they should go, he does not get wound up. He is mildly frustrated on occasion, but he does not take it personally and he does not obsess about it and he does not think it is his job to make the world the way he wants it to be. He does his bit and that’s it. Done. Move along now, nothing to see.

This is something that I could aim for, and I am doing so. It’s number one on my list of what I want to do differently when I go back into the workplace.

SJ and I had an interesting conversation about control, but I was never convinced that we had nailed the source of our difference – or, indeed, nailed whether we actually disagree. Then, this morning, I got something in my mail box that gave me a different take on it - this newsletter, which draws a distinction between investment and involvement. And I think it highlights what I was trying to say, but does a much better job.

My problem has been that I’ve invested myself in the wrong things. Other people’s approval is a good example. Actually, there’s almost nothing I can do about what others think of me, other than being polite. I can’t control their opinions of me. I’ve wasted a lot of time and energy trying – time and energy I could have spent doing project work, or singing and dancing and swimming.

Another example is trying to make the outcome of a project go my way. I can do my job, but I can’t make others do theirs in the way I would like. When I worked for Megabank Corp, I spent my life trying to get others to do what I wanted. Of course, none of it worked. because we are powerless over others. They kept on doing their thing in their way, and all I ever managed to do was to tire myself out and cause myself and those around me a great deal of angst.

My ex involves himself without investing himself. And I want to learn to do that. It’s why I’m seeking the wisdom to figure out what I can change and what I can’t – so that I don’t invest myself in the things I can’t change. Which is almost everything.

Doesn’t mean that I won’t be involved. But I won’t be invested.

And, as I keep re-learning and re-learning, the one thing I can change is me. And that, I’m both involved and invested in. Very much so.

(My apostrophe key appears to be sticking rather, so apologies in advance for any missing apostrophes!)

F has been talking about learning to face her fear. As discussed before, I have always tended to try to stare down my fears. Well, mostly. I am terrified of flying, due to a combination of claustrophobia, worries about hijacking, and only having GCSE physics and not really understanding aeronautics, and my solution to that is not to fly, but that’s much greener anyway and it’s not as though I feel I’m missing out on anything by doing so. I’m also scared of driving my car, and I do that on a fairly regular basis.

There’s more to it than that, though. Because a lot of the things I’m most proud of doing in my life are things that I’ve done despite being terrified, the things that I’ve had to pull myself out of my comfort zone to do.

For instance: the time, at the start of my second term at university, when someone persuaded me to walk up to the microphone at the Union General Meeting and announce that it was Labour Club Action Week and we had a stall over in the corner with a petition against the pit closures which people should come and sign. I had been a painfully shy teenager, and at university I learnt that actually I could deal with people. I still don’t much enjoy having to do it, particularly on the phone, but I can.

(I also learnt at university that politics is a mug’s game and no place for idealists, but that was actually a less significant lesson.)

For instance: the evening, a year or so after I’d left university, when I met someone who worked with a friend of mine in the pub one night, and enjoyed talking to him so much that at the end of the evening I asked if he’d like to go out for a drink sometime. We both drank in that pub often enough, but we’d never spoken before and who knows whether we would have done again if I hadn’t managed to screw my courage to the sticking point that night? (For the benefit of anyone who hasn’t worked it out yet, that person-who-worked-with-a-friend-of-mine is now my husband of six years and partner of eleven and a half, so I’m very glad I asked.)

Throughout my professional life I’ve faced down moments of apprehension. Interviews and professional exams, of course, but also arguing my point of view in meetings with senior managers, implementing new systems and waiting to see if they work, explaining a poor financial performance to managers. And I’ve come out of every one of them better and stronger, more confident in my ability to do my job. Even if the senior managers didn’t agree with my point of view or accept my recommendations, even if the new systems didn’t work. Rising to the challenge is what matters, not success or failure.

And I’m not rising to the challenge right now, because I don’t really have a challenge to rise to. I don’t have the chance to make recommendations and argue my case any more. I could implement new systems for departmental finance, but as departmental finance currently consists of two people, one of whom is me and the other of whom will listen patiently while you explain your proposed change, nod and smile and then carry on doing things just as before, that tends to be frustrating rather than challenging.

I’m good at coming up with creative solutions to problems. And I can even see where I could do this in my current job, but that’s not much use if no-one wants to listen. And meanwhile I am losing confidence in my abilities because they aren’t being tested.

I think I was twenty-four when I first read this book.

I am now nearly thirty-seven.

My mission in life has been to avoid fear - through reading, writing and fantasy, through substance abuse, through using other people and activities, through work. I have made major life decisions to avoid fear - changing my relationship, my profession, my living arrangements. I have spent enough on therapy and personal development to buy a house.

None of it has worked. Sometimes the fear has gone away for a short time, but it has always been back.

At the moment, my life is quite a scary place. I don’t know what I’m going to do when my course is over. I adore my living arrangements, but they are not permanent. I don’t have much financial security, and the current economic climate fills me with anxiety about my future. I am okay, and I am optimistic, but I am scared. If I could short-cut this period of my life and come out at a more certain future, I would do so.

And the truth is, I can’t. There’s nothing I can do about any of this. There is no magical solution to my fear.

A deeper truth is this: even if I had millions in the bank, I’d find something else to be anxious about. Because as long as I keep running away, my fear will keep chasing me. And I will never have the certainty I seek, because life is not like that.

For me, handing it over helps a lot. But it’s not enough, because I’m still doing the handing over in order to avoid the feeling. I am bargaining with God - “I’ll do what you want if you stop me feeling like this”. And bargaining with God never works, because it’s not really surrender. It’s trying to get my own way.

This week, I’ve realised something that I should have figured out twelve years ago. There is nothing I can do to take the fear away.

So I might as well face it directly.

I’m very good at running away from things that frighten me. Scary financial climate? Don’t read the news. In a lot of ways, this works for me, because it does allow me to turn my attention to things that I really can affect. But in other ways, it’s been storing up trouble, because I’ve been pushing my fear away rather than acknowledging it and coming to terms with it.

I still want to do this. I want to find a way not to be scared.

But I can’t.

And this week, I’ve started to learn a simple thing. If I just face these thoughts, if I look at them directly and accept that I am scared, and that I can’t do anything about it, then I feel better.

It changes my approach to everything. Rather than letting my emotion dominate how I behave, I can just accept the fear, let it pass, then decide what to do. Or, if I know what the right thing to do is, I can just get on with it - feel the fear and do it anyway.

I cannot believe how long it has taken me to understand this.

I spent most of yesterday having an email conversation with a friend who is giving up a well-paid corporate job to retrain as a primary school teacher next month. I have to say, I’m a little envious that she’s found something she really wants to do with her life. I think teaching is an incredible thing to do, and all the teachers I know seem so committed to what they do, even on the bad days. I’d enrol on a PGCE like a shot if I wasn’t terrified of children, but as it is I think I would be a really bad teacher.

Anyway, we were talking about careers, and wanting something more than spending 37.5 hours a week doing something that isn’t actually unpleasant and pays the mortgage, and whether that can ever be a realistic ambition. I know plenty of people who think it isn’t, and I’ve been told before now that I need to stop looking for the perfect job and just accept things as they are. I can kind of see where this point of view comes from: a bit like the Fantasy of Being Thin, I think there are a lot of people out there who see getting their “dream job” as the be-all and end-all, the Holy Grail that will turn their life around, and of course it’s never that simple. Even dream jobs need hard work.

I honestly don’t think I do that, though. (Maybe I do. You’d tell me if you thought I did, wouldn’t you?) I don’t think I’m looking for an unattainable ideal. I certainly don’t think I’m letting the fact that my current job is a long way from perfect and I honestly don’t think it’s a long term prospect stop me from trying to make improvements while I’m here. I’m not looking for “any job other than this one”. I don’t expect to find a job that doesn’t have its frustrations, or to wake up every single day eager to get to the office. I do think that it should be possible to find a job where I feel that I’m using my skills and talents in a way that actually helps people. I even think I could do that in an accounting role; it might even be possible to do it in my current role if the organisational culture wasn’t so set against letting non-academic staff have any real responsibility and I didn’t feel like just another beancounter. I could certainly do it in this sector.

At any rate, I’m not going to stop trying. I think that there’s a big difference between refusing to settle for something second-rate and pursuing an unattainable fantasy (and seriously, who has unattainable fantasies about being an accountant? My unattainable fantasy jobs are far more glamorous). And I refuse to give up, to accept that I’m never going to realise my full potential. I have said elsewhere, in another context, that a life of untapped potential seemed like a fate worse than death. Certainly, it’s not much of a life, and it’s not the one I want to live.

I had an argument with my partner on the consulting project. She wanted to write something in the project brief that wasn’t true. I said no.

She said, ‘It’s being artfully vague’.

I said, ‘It’s not true’.

She said, ‘You’re very rigid, aren’t you?’

We kinda stalled at that point, because I didn’t feel able to say what was in my head. Which was this: ‘Yes, I am very rigid about telling the truth these days, because I am an addict and addicts are compulsive liars.’ I don’t really know her well enough to share that stuff. (Yes, I do get that it is somewhat odd to feel like that and yet be willing to share it with the Internet.)

My first great love was an addict, and he was a compulsive liar. He lied about everything. He lied about his other girlfriends, but I get that. He had a good reason to do that. He lied about what he was doing with his time - hanging out in the bookies, downloading Internet pornography - but I get that too. What I never quite got was that he lied about everything. He would have lied about the weather if I’d ever had occasion to ask him about it, and he would have done it even if I was standing next to him looking out of the window. In the world of addicts, this is called crazy-making behaviour, and you can probably see why.

And he taught me well.

One of the most difficult aspects of working steps 4 and 5 has been coming to terms with the fact that I too am a liar.

I have often lied to my partners, to disguise my addictions. Mostly I have not been hanging out in the bookies or downloading Internet pornography, but I have done things which are just as shameful and just as damaging to my relationships.

I’ve deceived others through deceiving myself. More often, though, it’s been a deliberate, knowing deceit, so that I could get what I want, so that I wouldn’t have to be alone, so that I would always have a safety net, so that I didn’t have to get too close. And even when I’m telling the truth I can deceive people, because I spin it to bring out the aspects I want others to hear, and keep silent about what makes me look bad or puts the relationship at risk.

But I already knew that. I’m expecting to have to make amends to every single person I’ve ever been involved with, and that’s okay. I want to. None of them deserved what I did to them.

I hadn’t realised just how much I lied to other people, though. I don’t think I ever lied about the weather, but I lied about more or less everything else. My past is a litany of broken promises and unkept commitments. I’ve been willing to say absolutely anything to get people to like me, with no regard for whether or not it was the truth. I’ve agreed to take on work I couldn’t do, become friends with people that I really didn’t respect, got involved in projects that I didn’t have time for. I’ve said yes to everything since the age of sixteen, and most of it has involved pretending to be a completely different person from the one that I actually am. I would have said pretty much anything to get people to approve of me, whether or not I believed it to be true.

I’m really not sure how I can make amends for all of this. Apart from anything else, I’m really not sure how I can make amends to myself.

Telling the truth now is a start. It’s really very difficult - I often have to correct myself mid-sentence and say ‘no, that was a lie’, which is somewhat embarrassing. But it feels good. I feel safer when I tell the truth - I am no longer always convinced that I’m about to be found out.

And it’s recovery. This is what adults do - they tell the truth and they take responsibility for it.

It is late to be learning this lesson. I wish I’d learned it before - I could have avoided hurting people I love very much. But it is good to be learning it now.